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interesting book. i love mary karr's style, she is such a talented writer. that said, i found this book to be very disorganized in spots. jumping around. and suddenly after the first few chapters, it changed from first person to second person, which i really didn't like.
i still can't believe people grow up like the karr family. but look at how it's possible to turn out :)
i still can't believe people grow up like the karr family. but look at how it's possible to turn out :)
That summer I fell into reading as into a deep well where no voice could reach me. There was a poem about a goat-footed balloon man I recited everyday like a spell, and another about somebody stealing somebody else's plums and saying he was sorry but not really meaning it. I read the Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs and fancied myself running away to Africa to find just such an ape man to swing me from vine to vine.
Mary Karr is best known for her memoir of a childhood spent in a rough and tumble Texas town. This is her follow up to that memoir, taking the reader through her teenage years. At the start of the story, Mary is a bookish girl in a place that did not value intelligence, and especially not in women. She eventually makes friends and then discovers both boys and drugs. It was the seventies and she quickly fell in with a group of surfer boys and their hangers-on, which suited her contrarian nature and need to push back against the often pointless authoritarianism of her high school. Her parents are not able to provide a good example or even rules, although they do occasionally come through when needed.
So you ride home strangely placated. You lack the wits to acknowledge the jail cell of the previous night. If you'd glanced back even once, given that arrest one hard look, a lot of onrushing trouble might have been staved off.
Mary Karr is best known for her memoir of a childhood spent in a rough and tumble Texas town. This is her follow up to that memoir, taking the reader through her teenage years. At the start of the story, Mary is a bookish girl in a place that did not value intelligence, and especially not in women. She eventually makes friends and then discovers both boys and drugs. It was the seventies and she quickly fell in with a group of surfer boys and their hangers-on, which suited her contrarian nature and need to push back against the often pointless authoritarianism of her high school. Her parents are not able to provide a good example or even rules, although they do occasionally come through when needed.
So you ride home strangely placated. You lack the wits to acknowledge the jail cell of the previous night. If you'd glanced back even once, given that arrest one hard look, a lot of onrushing trouble might have been staved off.
I fell hard for Karr’s witty & vividly detailed Liar’s Club, a memoir of her dusty East Texas childhood. The only problem with this charming sequel is that it’s kinda more of the same. She takes us through her ‘60s-‘70s coming-of-age, from an awkward outcast to her teenage sex-&-drugs awakenings. (Her acid adventures seem almost quaint in the Opioid Era.) Karr mixes funny & feisty with recollections that are tender, sad & scary—sometimes all at once. Memorably, there’s a Dante-esque journey to a dive bar, the world’s sweetest suicide attempt & a she’s-leaving-home tableau that’d make the Beatles envious.
Cherry is the biographical story of a teenager coming into her own. I was told it was a great book by some chick on LJ and I was all geared up for a Great Book. It didn't hit the mark for me. It was good - but I just didn't feel like the story hit that bone of truth for me like it seems to have with other people. Maybe I was at that point in my life where you push away your youth and reading about someone struggling in a small town just hit too close to home? I don't know. I thought the writing was good but it was a book I had to work to read rather than anxiously waiting to read more.
It's an anorexic The Bell Jar in my mind.
It's an anorexic The Bell Jar in my mind.
This memoir has to be one of my favorites of all time! I love how Karr relays her story to the reader. We are that teenager looking for someone to latch onto. We are running around town with bad influences trying to escape reality.
Up until Chapter 17, this book is extremely engaging and well done. Karr is brilliant in taking so many topics and specific situations and making them into relatable moments of adolescence and growth. It feels timeless and universal.
Chapter 17 is where this all falls apart, as all Karr writes about is her drug use. She no longer explores her different relationships or her struggles. She barely even continues to tell stories; it's all observations of others and where she'll get her next hit. She struggles to make any of this relatable, have meaningful moments of reflection as she has elsewhere, or even describe her experiences in any engaging shape or form.
In the end, her inability to reflect on her drug usage undoes the whole book. It left me thinking of her as an out of touch Boomer, who wishes to go back to a youth lost to a haze of vapors.
Chapter 17 is where this all falls apart, as all Karr writes about is her drug use. She no longer explores her different relationships or her struggles. She barely even continues to tell stories; it's all observations of others and where she'll get her next hit. She struggles to make any of this relatable, have meaningful moments of reflection as she has elsewhere, or even describe her experiences in any engaging shape or form.
In the end, her inability to reflect on her drug usage undoes the whole book. It left me thinking of her as an out of touch Boomer, who wishes to go back to a youth lost to a haze of vapors.
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
2.5 stars, but rounded up because she is a very good writer. I was just somewhat upset by her experiences though and so I had a hard time enjoying it. I may post a longer review shortly, but my husband is waiting for me to watch something so I have to go. :)